So one of my players came to me today and he had a intersting idea, He does not get a chance to play alot so he is kinda inexperianced with alot of the classes and his idea was as follows:
Why dont we run a game that we make the players Switch Characters every hour or so of game play to give them a challange at "Role" playing and allow us to experiance new classes...
Personaly i think it is a neat idea and wanted to try it out so i started writeing a game up, i am gonna bring a egg timer and randomly have players shift one seat to the left every now and then.
Every hour might be a little much unless your playing a slapstick comic type game. Might work if you were running a stand alone type dungeon adventure; doesnt seem to plausable for a long term campaign as I am not sure how each player and the DM could keep track of all the player threads of plots and subplots.
Interesting idea though; might work for young teenagers, but they might have a tendancy to try to kill off players. You could just collect all the character sheets at the end of the game; or hour in you case; and shuffle and deal them out.
keep us posted on how this goes; sounds wierd thus intriging.
I don't know why when things come up that would be challenging that people have to dismiss it as something that's only good for little kids or cheesy dungeon romps. I personally think the idea sounds like a great way to experience more of the world and get a feel for playing different types of characters. We once had the idea of starting a game and then once character generation was done to tell everyone to trade characters with the player to the left. We only ever did it once, and the game never really took off--but I love those extreme variant character gen games. I'll be really interested to know how it goes.
I'll let you all know how it goes. i got the go ahead to run the game this afternoon. prolly gonna start later this week.
One hour is a bit short time...very hard to do anything except rather straightforward adventuring (and definitely wouldn't work in some of the campaigns I have played where players withhold information from other players...). I mean, in most cases just reading through the unfamiliar character sheet takes good chunk of time...
Might be interesting to try something a bit longer where the characters were swapped for each session. People would get a bit better into their characters and also the flow of action wouldn't be constantly interrupted ("The orc hits you for five points of damage...oh, it's time to change the characters again!")
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An interesting idea. If the one hour thing turns out to be too problematic, I'd try just switching up every session. Or you could take a break from your regular campaign and run a series of single session dungeon crawls with each person using a different character each time. All in all, its good to see someone that enthusiastic to try something new.
I'd at least try out this idea...I think switching each session would be a bit smoother than once per hour though.
Director of Narrative
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I've got an adventure in the works where the character's spirits are forcibly switched with each other's bodies at random intervals while exploring a ruined temple. My write-up got interrupted by my busy life at the moment and never really got to the mechanics of it all, but essentially it would involve the players swapping characters and playing as them but maintaining their own memories and motivations. Let me know how your experiment works out as it might help me finish this adventure writing exercise.
Something you might want to do is when you switcheroo the sheets, have a piece of blank paper that the players can scribble on for their character's thoughts as they pass it around, Might lend some cohesiveness and maybe a springboard for roleplaying.
(We did this in my English Lit class once. Everybody started a story, we were given 5 minutes to write something, anything, then pass it along to the next person. A lot of fun.)
Sounds like a cool idea. I'm of the opinion that an hour may be too short but I hope I'm wrong since that sounds really interesting.
I say go for it!
And please if you do try it, come back and post how it went. Good luck!